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Thursday, December 13, 2012

California
is due to lose a quarter of its Sierra snowpack by midcentury because
of climate change. And that's the low end of the estimate. The loss
could be bigger. Sierra snow is the largest reservoir in the state,
accounting for about a third of the annual water supply. Its
inexorable change into rain is a slow-moving train wreck.

Water
experts will quickly add that we're not losing the water, just the
form and timing of its release. The lost snowpack will come to us as
rain, so not to worry – too much.

But
from what this reporter has been able to glean from weeks of
interviewing knowledgable sources about water storage in California,
the time to start worrying was yesterday.

THE PAST NO GUIDE FOR THE FUTURE

We
will not only experience a shift from snow to rain, but it will come
in the winter rather than the spring when we need it for crops.
Moreover it will likely come as floods that cannot now be captured
and stored, and some of these floods will increase in areas like the
western side of the southern Sierras. Implicit in these predictions
is the need for a revolutionary reorganization of water management in
the state. The past cannot guide the future.

California
is not planning to build any large new surface reservoirs to contain
this rain, which may come as a shock to the uninitiated. Most of the
good sites have already been taken and what remains is too costly or
too inefficient. Instead, the emphasis is shifting from centralized
management of water to local and regional action. If your region
wants a new surface reservoir, you're free to build and pay for it.

A RETURN TO LOCAL MANAGEMENT

Berryessa Reservoir in Napa County;
regions may build their own; the state
is bowing out. Credit: P. McBroom

“The
great dreams of the past, of vast new storage systems everywhere
around the state and pipes that take water currently not being used
by anyone for anything hundreds of miles with no damage and at no
cost – that dream is over,” said Phil Isenberg, chair of the
Delta Stewardship Council, which is pushing water management at the regional level.

New
storage is “essential,” said Isenberg, “but you have to find
somebody who is willing to pay for it.....History indicates that we
are going into old style things which are regional or local.” A recent report by the California Roundtable, drawing upon a wide range of experts, agrees with this assessment.

"STAGGERING" CAPACITY LIES UNDERGROUND

Underground
storage, on the other hand, is a vast and largely unexplored
territory. California's potential for holding water in aquifers
staggers the imagination. Something on the order of 150 to 450
million acre feet (10 to 30 times the entire Sierra snowpack in an
average year) can be stored in underground basins that are
economically accessible, according to John Andrew, assistant deputy
director of the Department of Water Resources, who is the agency's
lead authority on climate change.

The
greatest basin in the state underlies the Central Valley, containing
one-fifth of all groundwater pumped in the nation. Because farmers
have been pumping the hell out of it for 100 years, this basin now
contains enough empty space to be identified as showing “the most
promise for large-scale groundwater recharge” in California,
according to a report by Juliet Christian-Smith of the Pacific
Institute, in a positive take on the half-empty glass story.

Snowpack will decline over the centuryCredit: Patricia McBroom

But
accomplishing the recharge of this – or any other – basin in the
state confronts water managers and policy makers with multiple
headaches. Our system is historically set up to discourage such use
of water. It isn't even considered a beneficial use, so few managers
have done it. There are currently promising moves toward recharging
critical basins, such as in the San Joaquin Valley around King's
River and in the Pajaro Valley near Santa Cruz, but much more is
needed.

ANTIQUATED LAWS; HALF-FORMED IDEAS

“Climate
change studies indicate that more extreme weather is coming and we
don't have a system in place to capture that water,” said Timothy
Parker, a consulting hydrologist and chair of the legislative
committee of California's Groundwater Resources Asso. “We should
be filling our basins back up. We need more storage and groundwater
is a good way to do that.” But once past such firm statements of
need, Parker and other experts who spoke on this issue fall into a
quicksand of shifting, half-formed ideas about next steps.

Who
owns the water that is put underground? Water is now tied to the
land. If you can pump it, you own it.

How
do you get it into the ground? That takes percolation ponds on farms
– a use of land that is not now readily accepted by farmers needing
to make a profit.

Where
does the surface water come from to recharge the aquifers? New
diversion plans cost money and require ingenuity on the part of
regional water managers, not to mention planning and risk taking.
You can't always get the water out that you put in.

How
about privatization issues? If the recharged basin water belongs to
landowners, then the massive Kern County Water Bank (taken over by
private interests in a secret deal by the state in the late 1990s and
supplied by the State Water Project that pumps from the delta) would
further enrich a small group of wealthy farmers, as they sell water
for new developments in the southland.

NEW FRAMEWORK FOR GROUNDWATER STORAGE

These
and other urgent questions call for a vigorous state-wide debate on
groundwater policy, leading to a new framework for managing this kind
of storage, especially its sustainable use. Legal and technical
confusion is everywhere; water
managers are just beginning to think about underground storage. In a
recent survey, most didn't know whether it would be less expensive or
more costly than surface storage. The great majority needed more
information.

“it's
really challenging!” said Brian Lockwood, staff hydrologist with
the Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency. “The laws (on
groundwater) are so antiquated. Reforms are badly needed. Most
people don't even have meters on their wells” to measure the amount
of groundwater removed. “If we could think of the Central Valley
as a whole, of the state as a whole,” we might have a chance, said
Lockwood, whose small water district is off the state and Federal
water grid.

Their coastal region depends for its water almost
exclusively on a groundwater basin. The state of the critically
depleted basin is fueling a creative venture to get water back into
the ground to achieve a sustainable supply, thus serving as a model
for regional responsibility.

ADULT SUPERVISION NEEDED

At
the end of a long interview, after two years of listening to
Californians fight over water coming out of the critical
Sacramento/San Joaquin watershed, he said “The
most important thing for survival of California as a society is for
everyone everywhere in the state to be prudent in their use of water,
to calm down and act like grownups, to reduce
the irrational and overblown demands for water that seem to be the
stock in trade of the water debate.

“We're
not running out of water” said Isenberg, “but it's a scarce
resource and we have to make some hard management decisions.”

That
would require courage and focus on the part of state planners who are
unfortunately preoccupied with building huge tunnels under the delta
to divert an ever-decreasing supply of Sierra snowmelt. The tunnels
offer a centralized water system out of the 20th century,
while nature is cooking up floods in your backyard.

About Me

Journalist/anthropologist; author of two books, former science and magazine writer with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Published "The Third Sex," on women adapting to formerly all-male career roles in the financial districts of New York and San Francisco in 1986 with wide reviews.
As professor, taught courses on women and work at UC Berkeley, Mills College, Rutgers University and Diablo Valley College. Affiliated with the California Studies Association at UC Berkeley.